IBM

If you are good at sales and/or self-promotion, you might be able to make it at IBM.

I came on board as part of an acquisition. After an initial period of "this is going to be great!", it quickly became obvious that IBM had no clue what to do with our people or customers. One by one, customers left and people were put on the bench.

1. At IBM, you are basically on your own for finding work. Perhaps if you come into IBM and work your way up, you can build a network, but coming in through an acquisition, you are basically ignored.

2. Folks at IBM are constantly begging (and yes, that's an appropriate term) for work, since there's little effort made to ensure people are staffed on projects. Even new hires often go onto internal Slack groups begging for work before they're put on a PIP and shown the door.

3. There is no recognition of technical skills that I could see. It appeared the only way to get ahead was to get co-workers to write glowing reviews about you. If you worked for an external customer, you were expected to solicit reviews of your work. There is no way to simply do excellent technical work and be recognized without shameless self-promotion.

4. IBM prefers to staff technical resources from cheap overseas labor, so if you're like we were (well-compensated and based in North America), you're out of luck. You're too expensive for anybody to touch you.

5. HR is understaffed, to the point that when I resigned, my resignation got "lost" and I continued to get paid. Now I have to go through a mess to return money. It says something about a company when they have an entire elaborate website just for correcting overpayments to employees. There are obviously a lot of mistakes made.

Management needs to do proper due diligence on acquisitions. There is no way that acquiring our company made any sense, and it's very sad that most people either left or will likely get laid off within a year because of the mismatch in skills and salaries.